Witcher 2 dev: RPGs not in competition

CD Projekt scriptwriter Jan Bartkowicz reckons that role-playing games like Dragon Age and The Witcher 2 don't compete with each other, because fans of the genre are more likely to buy everything they can get their hands on than fans of action or sports games would be.

"Dragon Age really was influenced by us and that's great," Bartkowicz told Eurogamer in an interview to coincide with the developer's Eurogamer Expo session today.

"It's a genre that doesn't have that many games and it's not like that serious a competition, because at the end of the day if you're an RPG player you're not going to get that many games, so you're not considering, 'Is it going to be Fallout 3 for me or The Witcher?' You're probably going to play both.

"It's not like Bad Company or Modern Warfare where you're playing through the whole year. That's why I think our little RPG genre family is more tight, because we're not looking at each other thinking, 'Argh, they're going to steal our gamers!'"

Bartkowicz also said he felt BioWare titles Mass Effect and Dragon Age were influenced by The Witcher in several departments.

"This is going to be bold, right, but I think Mass Effect was and Dragon Age was for sure, because we made some things that weren't really that popular in RPGs at the time," he told us.

"For example, erotic themes in RPG games - it's still really difficult to handle. You see games running into clichéd areas when doing erotic content. It's hard to do them as a believable thing because the player's always trying to find the hidden mechanism behind it so it will be easy to show.

"Mass Effect has its way to do this and I think Dragon Age was bolder than that too. So I think Witcher was an important factor in this department."

The Witcher 2 is due out next year on PC. Check out the full CD Projekt interview for more on what to expect and what was shown at the Eurogamer Expo today.